Sunday, March 3, 2013

Quivering Incidents Of Prose

The fictional world of Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden is one where a
face is “a record of time’s weight on the soul”. Love is “the result of having
caught a glimpse of another’s loneliness”. A character’s mind is a “black
leaf-encumbered forest”. The landscape is “ripped to pieces by its own
elemental energies”. And the sky is full of “quivering incidents of daybreak”.

Readers of Aslam’s earlier novels will be familiar
with such quivering incidents of prose and he serves up large slabs of the same
in his fourth. In theme and backdrop too, The
Blind Man’s Garden is similar to his The
Wasted Vigil, with noble and sometimes naïve individuals caught up in the
maw of current events over which they have little control. Of a character in
that earlier novel, Aslam wrote that her interest was “caught by personalities
and events on the edges of wars, by lives that have yet to arrive at one of
history’s conflicts, or those that have moved away from the conflagration.” In The Blind Man’s Garden, the
conflagration and conflicts are closer home, something tersely and more
obviously stated in the novel’s first sentence: “History is the third parent”.

This is largely the story of Mikal, who travels with
his foster brother Jeo from Pakistan to Afghanistan shortly after the events of
9/11, ostensibly to tend to the war wounded there. Events take a cataclysmic
turn, as they have a habit of doing in fiction, and Mikal faces a difficult
journey home, having to deal with Taliban fighters, local Afghan warlords and
American torture chambers. Along the way he manages to acquire a pet, a playful
snow leopard cub. The force is strong with this one.

The novel also tells us of the fates of the ageing
Rohan, Jeo’s father and former headmaster of a school that is now being used for
more nefarious purposes than education; and of Naheed, Jeo’s wife, whose heart
used to beat for Mikal before her wedding and who, in the absence of both of
them, has to ward off an sinister, elderly suitor.While Mikal is battling
through travails in Afghanistan, the others become embroiled in chaotic events
to do with a school siege planned by a former armyman determined to show who’s
boss.

Every now and again, Aslam introduces dramatic images,
some surreal, some overly weighted by symbolism. Snares are set for birds on a
tree in Rohan’s garden, a trap from which they try to extricate themselves by
fluttering helplessly in the manner of his characters. At other times, a herd
of horses emerges from underground, a fakir roams the streets clad only in
chain links that represent the sins of supplicants, and a mysteriously-appearing
ruby is used for ransom.

The heavy-handedness extends to the plot, with a
series of all-too-neat coincidences and twists. Naheed loves Mikal but is
carrying Jeo’s child; Jeo stumbles upon his wife’s secret by finding her
letters in Mikal’s satchel; Rohan is instrumental is saving the life of another
boy also named Jeo; Mikal kills two Americans, then redemptively saves a third.

After a while, one ceases to look
upon these people as flesh-and-blood characters. They become both less than
real and less than mythical, striding through strange worlds and seeking an
elusive salvation that only love can provide. Scenes of brutality intersect
with those of tenderness and there are also anguished paeans to do with the
futility of extremism, in whatever form, in whichever country. Aslam’s heart is
clearly in the right place; if only he hadn’t made every event excessively
portentous, The Blind Man’s Garden
would have been a more affecting depiction of what Atiq Rahimi in The Patience Stone, another novel set in
Afghanistan, called “the mad world of men with notions of honour, pride and a
woman's place.”